Posts Tagged ‘Things you shouldn’t buy’

On a whim, when I purchased my Canon 28mm-135mm lens I also ordered a Phoenix 2x Teleconverter as well. I’ve had a chance to play with it and so I thought I’d share my thoughts. However I must warn you, it’s not very pretty.

In a nutshell, if I could have my $79.99 back, I’d take it in two shakes of a lambs tail. It had a decent review after I did a bit of digging on the internet, therefore I went with it and bought it. I didn’t really need it, I bought it mainly just to see if it would be usefull. I will admit it does a decent job of extending my 70-300mm out to about 400mm, after that it’s pretty uselesss. One of the big downfalls, and this may be with all teleconverters, is that it doesnt auto-focus when racked out. It’s not a super big deal because I am able to manually focus pretty fast, but the intent of the teleconverter is to double your length, and for wildlife or sports photographers the ability to not quickly auto-focus can be a detriment.

One of the problems with teleconverters, as far as I can tell by reviews, is that many of them destroy your image quality when racked out with a higher focal length lens. I experience this problem with my 70-300mm, which the teleconverter made into a 600mm. The frame was practically un-focusable and the resulting image looks like my newborn nephew took a photo with his fisher-price digital toddler camera.

I can’t say many good things about this. But I’ll let the test photo’s speak for themselves:

As you can see, far from anything decent. These were both shot with a 70-300mm with the phoenix 2x attached. Focused out to a total of 600mm.

So on to the pro’s and cons.

Pro’s:

• $79.99 paperweight

• $79.99 new toy for the puppy

• Decent for doubling the minimal focal length of a lens (turning a 70mm into a 140mm) withouth zooming.